Nobody's Lady (20 page)

Roslyn held out a hand to stop me. “I understand things between the three of you are complicated. But I do think Elfriede can be happy without Jurij. I
know
it. Only … ”

Jurij’s hand on my wrist slackened at the same time his back stiffened. “Then what’s the problem?”

Roslyn tilted her head toward me, as if waiting for me to speak. The specter stepped around Jurij and walked toward the doorway, the ink well, quill, and certificate left behind on the table. I leaned around Jurij, trying to get a better look at the certificate. “I think Roslyn is saying we need to make peace with Elfriede.”

Roslyn clapped her hands. “Yes!” She reached forward and wrapped her arms around my shoulders for a hug. “I told Friede she just needed to talk to you!” She pulled back to look me in the eyes. “That there’s no way her sister could be doing anything to hurt her on purpose!”

Jurij had let my wrist go in the confusion, and I patted Roslyn’s back awkwardly. Even with the paper in my fist, I figured it was better than to pat her with my hand that had started bleeding again. “Roslyn’s right,” I said, glaring at Jurij pointedly. “We shouldn’t say we’re getting married before
discussing it
with the people most affected.”

Jurij furrowed his brow and refused to return my look. I followed his eyes to the doorway and noticed the specter had left us. Before we’d had a chance to sign anything.

Roslyn noticed now too and pulled away from me, covering her mouth with one hand. “Oh! Sorry. Did I make you reconsider?”

I scowled. Agreeing to talk to Elfriede first wasn’t the same as telling the specter we’d changed our minds. “What do you mean?”

Roslyn stood on her toes and tried to peer over Jurij’s and my shoulders at the table behind us. “Well, they’re not supposed to pull out a marriage certificate unless they know both parties want to get married, right?”

I felt a twitch at the pit of my stomach. She was probably right. But I’d been taken aback. I’d tried to play along, but was that the same as accepting the marriage? How did the specters judge that anyway? The piece of paper showing Luuk felt heavy in my hand, and I tucked it into my sash beside the golden copper.

“So I figured if he left before you signed it, he must be waiting for you to make peace first.” She smiled.

I gave her a faltering smile in return. “You’re right.” Jurij turned and peered over the table. Roslyn seemed eager to get a look, too, so I grabbed her hand gently and led her to the door. “Thank you,” I cooed, trying again to sound like Elfriede. “You’ve given us a lot to talk over. Um … ”

“I’ll give you some privacy,” said Roslyn. I almost laughed at that, considering what we’d discovered about moving drawings on pages. She squeezed my hand. “And thank
you
, Noll.” She pulled the door shut behind her.

I had a feeling that might be the last time I’d hear those words from anyone for quite a while.

“Noll, Luuk’s page! Quickly!”

I was across the room with my hand digging into my sash for the crumpled wad before I could think about how embarrassed and angry I was. He sounded
that
worried. Jurij peered over my shoulder as I unfurled the paper.

It took me a moment to orient myself to the drawing. But Luuk was crying, tears clearly visible on his ink face. His hands gripped iron bars, and he shook them. His mouth was open, and I could almost hear the cry for help passing across his silent lips.

“Damn it.” I shoved the paper at Jurij’s chest. He caught it with trembling hands. “I could have told you there was no way he’d get away with it. What were you thinking?”

Jurij pulled the page away from his chest and examined it. “They’re on their way. They’ll find some way to help him. And
you
wouldn’t help us.”

“Well, you pretty much forced me to help anyway, didn’t you? You might have told me what you were planning.”

Jurij paused. “We thought he might be watching you too closely.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “Well, in that case, he would have already seen me meeting the lot of you and being shown this page.”

“That’s why we stalled the one servant. To keep his attention on him.”

I exhaled a deep breath. “Do you think the man’s an idiot?”

The lump at Jurij’s throat bobbed, and he laid Luuk’s page on the table, absently smoothing it with one hand. “I don’t know anything about the man. Other than he changed you.”

“He changed
me
?” I crossed my arms. “Don’t talk to me
about change. I haven’t changed.
You
have!”

“You
have
changed,” Jurij said. “The Noll I love
loved
me. The only thing I can think of that might have changed your mind is him!”

I snorted. “Not falling in love with my sister, having a Returning with her, flaunting your sickeningly sweet affection in front of me day after day, and marrying her?”

“You loved me even so. You kissed me on my wedding day.”

He had a point. I’d assumed that hadn’t meant anything to him because he didn’t have a will of his own. “It wasn’t him who changed me.”

Jurij let out a breath. “Then what did?”

I almost told him. He’d probably swear I imagined the whole thing or call me a liar. Yes, this new and changed Jurij would probably never believe me, but staring into his eyes and remembering the flames I once saw there, I felt the tension release from my neck and shoulders. I wanted to burst out crying. I wanted to hug him, to tell him everything. I took a step forward. But the marriage certificate on the table caught my eye.

If you think I am about to give my blessing to your happiness
…

This is what the specter had written while we’d been trying to distract him. He hadn’t been distracted at all.

If you think I am about to give my blessing to your happiness, you are mistaken. I cannot stop you from spending your nights beside the former husband of your own sister, but I am lord of this village, and under my new law, only my Ailills give permission to wed. There is no will of the first goddess in this village now. She foolishly gave me permission to crush her power into dust.

But it does not matter. I cannot hear you when not around my retainers, but I can see you, as I assume you and your cohorts might have learned. I allowed you this knowledge. I do not understand why they seem to think they can enter my castle unseen when they know what I can do. But I must forgive them for being foolish; they are quite new to the freedom of will that you and the other women have so long enjoyed.

This proposed marriage is a falsehood, a distraction meant to send me running to you. I have seen you. You push away this boy for whom you once risked everything because now he has free will. You do not like men with free will. You never have. You may stumble over your feelings for him now, but you will never commit to marrying him, or any other. Men are no longer docile enough for you.

Nothing you could do would make me come running. If your cohorts want answers, they should have asked you. You played a larger role in all of this than I ever could. As it is, they trespass without permission in my castle, and here they will stay.

Perhaps you will bring my pages back to me when you stop by for a visit, as I no doubt expect you to soon.

I flipped the paper over, dreading what I might see on the other side. A drawing burst to life of Master Tailor in a cell, his legs crossed on the stone floor. Beside him sat Sindri, his shoulder against the iron bars, and Darwyn and Tayton, who held hands even as Darwyn seemed to be shouting something and gripping his hair in anger. A pair of legs paced on and off the page, boots I guessed belonged to Jaron.

“He got them all,” I said. Since it hadn’t been that long since the men had left the tavern, I could only imagine Ailill had sent out his specters and a carriage to bring the rest of them to his cells that much quicker.

Jurij growled and began pacing back and forth across the room in echo of Jaron. “Now what?”

I folded the second moving drawing and tucked it in my sash. “Now we walk in through the front gates.”

We didn’t speak until we’d reached the outskirts of the village, past the Tailor Shop. Seeing the empty, darkened windows emphasized where we were going like a punch to the stomach. I spared a moment’s regret for not racing to tell Siofra and Alvilda. But then we’d be headed to the castle trailing behind a raging, screaming woman who probably wouldn’t make it past the first set of specters.

“What did he mean, you played a larger role? And that we should have asked you?”

I was so distracted by my thoughts I flinched at hearing Jurij speak beside me. The timid smile that had formed at the thought of Alvilda in a rage faded, replaced by the cold hardness of the reality I’d created by going through the cavern pool.

The moon was bright, but I kept my eyes fixed on the path. I shivered as we neared my childhood home. Not just because of the cold nip in the air, or even due to the sister who slept behind closed doors. But because of the memories of another night I ventured down this path, cold and damp, determined to free the man who now walked beside me, the one I now pushed away.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Of course you wouldn’t answer.” He gave the home in which his former wife lived the briefest of glances and led the way into the woods. “How about this then: What did he mean, the Ailills?”

“That’s his name. The lord’s, I mean. Ailill.”

A twig snapped loudly beneath Jurij’s foot. “Huh. I guess no one ever bothered to ask his name before.”

I tucked the pesky too-long piece of hair behind my ear, feeling guilty for so long not caring to know his name. “No one cared about anything outside of their men and goddesses before.”
Or, in my case at least, other people’s men.

Jurij pushed aside a branch hanging across the path. “So the Ailills? Plural?”

“It’s what he calls the specters.”

“The what?”

“His servants.”

“Why?”

“Long story.”

“I’d like to know.”

“I’m not sure we have time.” The beaten shrubbery ahead marked the path to the cavern.

We were quiet then, but soon Jurij interrupted the silence. “You know, you never asked.”

“Asked what?”

Jurij nodded toward the path ahead. “What it felt like the last time I was here. What it felt like to have my wedding day turned upside down.”

I stopped. We didn’t talk much about
my
time there. I didn’t even think to ask about his. “You remember?”

“Not much. My whole life until things changed seems like a haze.” He paused beside me. “But I remember … the shaking. Then waking in a strange place. The blur of white figures, the dark void at my bedside.”

“The servants. And Ailill,” I said. “Wearing his veil.”

“I asked for Elfriede.” Jurij traced the line of the scar on his cheek. “I remember the pain on my face, I remember how much it hurt, but it was nothing compared to how I felt being apart from Elfriede.”

And he was parted from her because of me.

“But that was stupid of me,” he said, his fist tightening around the paper in his hand. “I know that now.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment, a moment we shouldn’t have wasted just then.

“I was so consumed with thoughts of Elfriede,” said Jurij, breaking the silence, “I didn’t stop to think about it at first, but the lord, he was … a mess. He was wet. His veil and hat were uneven.”

That was after he saved me from the pond.
I shuddered thinking about what happened then, and how we’d fought in the cavern—how I’d almost killed him then and would go on to “kill” him for a time shortly thereafter. In the time between then, we’d parted as soon as the carriage door opened. Before he’d joined me in the dining room, he’d stormed upstairs—probably to treat Jurij. Although not to the “best of his ability,” as I remembered asking.

“He took his gloves off, and I remember thinking how
pale
he was. How ghastly pale. Like one of his servants dressed in black.”

“He’s not quite so pale as that,” I said, realizing Jurij had never seen Ailill without his mask. “But yes, he’s fair.”

Jurij didn’t comment on it. I was glad. I didn’t want to explain how I came to know Ailill’s face so well.

“There was warmth on my face, then,” continued Jurij, “and for a moment … I saw things with a clarity I’d never felt before then. The pain on my face lifted. The pain in my heart eased. I wasn’t thinking of Elfriede. I wasn’t thinking about anything.”

He
did
try to heal him with his magic.

“Then it all stopped. The lord pulled his hand away and tugged on his glove roughly, like he’d burnt his hand. He said, ‘I suppose you felt nothing then. When my goddess’s lips touched yours.’”

My goddess?
I’d forgotten he would call me that from time to time. I knew I was his goddess once, but I’d bristled every time he said it. Now …

“I was so confused. I remembered you kissed me.” He chanced a glance my way. “But it meant nothing to me when it happened. It wasn’t the first thing on my mind even until he asked, but as that warmth faded away, I saw it clearly. Just for a moment. I
felt
something for you. Something greater than I’d ever felt for you, something like what I’d thought I could only feel for Elfriede.”